These notes are from lectures that constitute an extended meditation on Matthew 5:13-16, which depicts an encounter between the church and the world:

13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. 14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Mat 5:13-16 ESV)

The question to be addressed: “What does it mean for us as people to participate in and lead churches to move into the world in the name of Jesus so that things change as a result?”

I. Theological Framework of Cultural Engagement

A. Stages of Cultural Interaction – How do these fit you and the people to whom you are ministering? These may or not be self conscious.

1. Cultural Antagonism

+: real need for a discriminate eye about what culture to accept

– : does not take what God says about his creation seriously; isolationist

2. Cultural Appreciation

+: takes what God says about his creation seriously

-: idea heavy, action light

3. Cultural engagement

+: Anticipates actual outworking of Revelation 21 and acknowledges power to contribute to world’s flourishing.

– : Power of sin and curse is great, effects of engagement can seem ephemeral, need never ends, overwhelming, leads to 4.

4. Cultural Disillusionment. You have grand visions for 3, you communicate and nurture them in your people, pouring all your energy into them and they either end up working 140 hours/week or can only get a job as a fry cook at McDonalds. You might blame them for your own disillusionment.

5. Cultural Reassessment – re-assesses theology and theopraxis of culture in light of experience. This class is a product of G. Thompson’s cultural reassessment.

B. Does God intend to use His Church to participate in and transform actual cultural structures? Yes. Why?

1. Trinitarian Love for the World – the triune God is actually oriented toward the world favorably. Father-Son-Holy Spirit actually LOVES THIS WORLD.

a. Contra: divine hostility to the world (God is hostile to sin not the world.)

b. Contra: divine indifference to the world (this is the view or attitude that creation is a backdrop for God’s redemption but does not itself participate in that redemption).

2. Enduring Goodness of Creation – Seven times God rejoices in the world’s goodness. Humans are designed to cultivate the world – to nurture its goodness. Therefore, the created order is central to God’s plan.

a. Contra: Anti-materialism (neo-gnosticism) – perspective about the nature of the world that the spiritual is higher and material is lower order in creation.

b. Contra: Pietism – perspective about the nature of salvation / redemption that the spiritual is more important than the material. Sometimes under this view the material realm has -0- importance. Seek to identify this view in activities that address the nature of salvation such as preaching, views on eschatology, etc.

The implications of anti-materialism and (especially) pietism are very important for all of the analysis below.

3. Pervasive Nature of Sin – sin profoundly affects both the spirtual and the material.

a. Guilt – this is the human experience of sin that affects both legal status before God (guilt proper) and human experience in the form of shame.

b. Corruption – this is the non-human experience of sin in the form of the lit. dis-integration of the world; the blow that sin struck against shalom. Unlike guilt which is fundamentally personal, corruption extends to all of creation.

The co-reign of guilt and corruption within the pervasive nature of sin is essential to a theology of cultural engagement. Viewing the effect of sin only in terms of guilt ignores the effect of sin on world structures. [JCJ: The curse itself might be a limited form of the ultimate judgment of God saying “not my will be done, but thy will be done to us together”?] Viewing the effect of sin only in terms of corruption fails to deal with the human problem that causes cultural corruption.

NB: The best path to reprove and guide others involves a balance of affirmation and protest.

4. Expansive Scope of the Gospel – Scripture uses the word “gospel” and the concept behind it much more expansively than we tend to use it. CFRC (top row) is not merely redemptive history but all of history.

a. Gospel (definition): The good news that in Jesus Christ God is taking a good creation that has fallen into sin and restoring it in every single way until at last all things are made new.

i. In Jesus’ first miracle, the wine actually participates in the gospel, participates in God’s salvation.

ii. See John’s account of the resurrection.

iii. Mary mistakes the risen Christ for a gardener. How right she is.

b. Gospel expands into all of these categories:

Creation

Fall

Redemption

Consummation

God

Peace

Condemnation

Reconciliation*

With God

Self

Dignity

Shame**

Image of Christ

Perfected

Others

Delight

Violence

Love

Delight

World

Fruitfulness

Futility✦

Recultivation✦✦

Flourishing

Kingdom

Shalom

Sorrow

Shalom in Process

Shalom at Rest

* Systematic theological categories of justification and union with Christ go here.
** “You can look in the mirror and not like your own face. Think of that!” What a distortion of the goodness of our creation in God’s image! Systematic theological category of sanctification goes here. Also the restoration in us of the Imago Dei because we are conformed to the image of His Son. See (or think about) Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18; and Col 3:10 in this connection. Christ came to restore us to each other in His body; herein lies the scriptural motif of neighbor and church.
✦ Thorns and thistles.
✦✦ Christ is the firstborn of all creation. Col. 1:15 Cessation from strife and striving.

i. This expansive view guards against a merely personal gospel (i.e., only the first row).

ii. This expansive view guards against a merely social gospel (i.e., pieces of rows 3 and 4).

iii. Either a merely personal gospel or a merely social gospel cannot sustain a theology of cultural engagement.

c. For right now, Jesus himself is doing all 4 rows of the chart. [JCJ – I think this is wrong but I need to think about it. I think that the church is Jesus’ authoritative representative on earth by the power of the Spirit commissioned to move the Kingdom from redemption to consummation.]

d. The work of Jesus is not divisible. He came to do all of this. “It is finished.” means all of these things.

e. Read Romans 8 in the light of this full gospel — sons and daughters of God and creation are together again. There is a heavily material view of salvation in Chapter 8.

f. The top row is experientially primary, but not redemptively primary.

g. For people who are resistant to this view of the gospel, or are still learning how to see it, G. Thompson said: “I catch my people in their own moments of delight in the world and claim it for them in the name of God and His gospel.”

5. Deep Meaning of Union With Christ – God dwells with us. Humans are made for God. Humans participate in Christ’s work through union

ii. No ethical – How do I follow Jesus? No answer, therefore lack of endurance and likelihood of failure.

6. Missional Vocation of the Church – Scripture testifies that God is on mission in this world. How? Through His church. God’s mission of glory is worked out through the life of the church. The church is essential to his mission in both local expression and global reach. There is lots of resistance to the Church as an agent of redemption in the world. Reformed Circles: 2 Kingdom Theology, Spirituality of the Church (Thornwell / Dabney). There are three aspects to the missional vocation of the church:

a. We are the recipients of God’s mission. If we lose sight of this we become merely angry activists.

b. The church itself is an embodiment of God’s mission and a foretaste of its consummation.

i. Church is about Christians doing what you do and letting non-Christians see what you do.

ii. We represent God’s reconciliation.

iii. Learn to love one another in the church.

iv. Must be a place where the world (of course, creation sense here) is valued and taken seriously.

v. We are called together to embody the New World in our lives, liturgy, and relationships.

vi. The goal is not the happiness of our people but the manifestation of God’s kingdom.

c. We are bearers of the mission of God. Vital part of this is proclamation of the Word. Our mission is to bring the word of Jesus Christ into the world. The words we say must bear witness to God’s life in this world.

i. Worship – corporate worship is a witness act. In our worship we bear witness to the Kingdom of Heaven. This has significant implications of language and liturgy. We should be more Christian and not less, but also intelligible.

ii. Welcome – open homes and churches to nonbelievers, bearing witness to the kingdom of God. The Table is important; table manners have Kingdom implications.

iii. Work – New City Commons – the “space” made by the quadrilateral vertices of Government, School, Commerce/Market, and Church to collaborate together for the common good. Church and its people want to collaborate for the good of our neighbors, and collaboration to create such common spaces manifests the Kingdom of Heaven itself.

7. Restorational Character of Eschatology – the future of history is a restorational future.

a. Guards against escapist eschatology (Christians will be removed from world) which is very strong in American Evangelical eschatology.

i. No specific commitment to timing – no commitment to a particular millenial view is necessary.

ii.No specific claims about particulars (e.g., is the Arch going to be there in the eschaton?).

c. Sets the stage for the mission of the church that continues as a participant in the future restored world.

i. [Newbigin Quote from Signs amid the Rubble. Until I figure it out, here are some proxies.]

ii. “[T]he Church is not what it is because it exists by the mercy of God who calls the things that are not as though they were. [ Rom. 4.17] The Church is not merely a historical reality but also an eschatological one.” Newbigin, The Household of God.

iii. “The Church is both a means and an end, because it is a foretaste. It is the community of the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of our inheritance. The Church can only witness to that inheritance because her life is a real foretaste of it, a real participation in the life of God Himself. Thus worship and fellowship, offering up praise and adoration to God, receiving His grace, rejoicing in Him, sharing one with another the fruits of the Spirit, and building up one another in love are all essential to the life of the Church. Precisely because the Church is her and now a real foretaste of heaven, she can be a witness and instrument of the kingdom of heaven.” Newbigin, The Household of God.

And he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. 2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. 5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed. 6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. 9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. 10 Have you not read this Scripture:

“‘The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

11 this was the Lord’s doing,

and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

12 And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them. So they left him and went away. (Mar 12:1-12 ESV)

Darden Caylor at Mercy Road Fellowship yesterday explained that the when the tenants see the son and decide to kill him, they have ownership of the vineyard in mind. Kill the heir take the land for good, for the owner will be deprived of an heir. We would all do well to ponder Jesus’ question in verse 9: “What will the owner of the vineyard do?” We know more about the owner’s response to the tenants than did the chief priests, scribes, and elders did that day. The Lord made the “the stone that the builders rejected . . . the cornerstone.” Translated into the narrative of the parable:

The Owner made alive again the heir whom the tenants killed. The Owner appointed his resurrected son to be His own property manager and Representative. Owner and Representative manage the property with this overriding mission: to woo back the very tenants who beat and killed all of the Owner’s servants, even the Representative himself, so that the former tenants and murderers and their progeny might be co-heirs of the Representative and owners of the vineyard, united inseparably to the Representative whom they killed, who now “lives to make intercession for them.” Heb. 7:25.

The former tenants are indeed replaced, but some like Saul / Paul reapply for the same post! Maybe this is point at which, as always must happen, the analogical breaks down – but the new tenants (v. 9) must stand in solidarity with the old tenants in their responsibility for the son’s death in order to reap the reward of ownership that the son achieves for them as the Representative. It may take some time for me to search out these boundaries, but the preservation of a remnant (Rom. 9:27, 11:5) and all that grafting and engrafting are probably key. Moving along to Romans 11 . . .

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/the-wicked-tenants-futurecast/feed/0onefearThe Word Has Been Abroad – Introduction 1https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/the-word-has-been-abroad-introduction-1/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/the-word-has-been-abroad-introduction-1/#commentsThu, 09 Sep 2010 13:37:45 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=175We begin with a proxy. Life does not leave time for Hans Urs von Balthasar‘s seven-volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, but it does leave time for Aidan Nichols’s guide to this seven volume work, The Word Has Been Abroad. So where you see a characterization of Balthasar, remember its a characterization of Nichols characterizing Balthasar.

The Glory of the Lord is itself but the first piece piece of Balthasar’s systematic theology trilogy, and the one in which he meditates upon the good, the beautiful, and the true. The rest of the trilogy includes the five-volume Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, examining “the action of God and the human response, especially in the events of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday” and the three-volume Theo-Logic (in which Balthasar examines ontology and the relation of the nature of Jesus Christ (christology) to reality itself.

Happily, Balthasar seems to be a biblicist, in the best sense of the word. That is, he has a high view of and robust respect for holy scripture and its role in the life of believers. Importantly, for our purposes, he begins his systematics in The Glory of the Lord with aesthetics and an extended consideration of beauty (glory) and its role. This is important, because I anticipate that human attitudes, beliefs, and practices regarding beauty significantly determine the nature and extent of their interaction with culture.

The key to the trilogy is found in the Scholastic notion of transcendental determinations of being, qualities so pervasive throughout reality that they crop up in all the categories of particular being, and so may be said to ‘transcend’ such categorical distinctions as those differentiating substance and accident, quality and mode. . . .There is a correspondence, an analogy, as well as a staggering disproportion . . . between worldly beauty and divine glory. There is a correspondence, an analogy, as well as a staggering disproportion between finite freedom and the infinite freedom of God. There is a correspondence, an analogy, as well as a staggering disproportion between the structure of created truth and the structure of divine truth. (xix)

Many recent theological debates have quibbled over the extent that we can (and should) learn of God and glimpse His mission in the world in the created order and through “common grace.” This fundamental premise of the Trilogy gives greater texture to this proposition (that general revelation does have much to teach of God and something of his mission as well), and reminds us of just how BIG are His presence and activity in the universe and its creation. The discussion of general revelation, common grace, and their role in the church has seemed rather flat to me; this analytical key to the Trilogy begins to restore multidimensionality to that debate.

Beauty corresponds to glory. It may take some time to unpack and examine that one.

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/the-word-has-been-abroad-introduction-1/feed/1onefearOf Blogs and Resurrection – Love in Sin and Sin in Love (Reprise)https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/of-blogs-and-resurrection-love-in-sin-and-sin-in-love-reprise/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/of-blogs-and-resurrection-love-in-sin-and-sin-in-love-reprise/#respondWed, 01 Sep 2010 04:33:50 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=163Though long fallow, this blog space may exhibit some Autumn resurrection that looks more like tiny shoots of Spring. Whether these shoots blossom into kudzu or tulips remains to be seen. I can’t get away from the fundamental question of how Christians are supposed to live individually and together (as the Church visible) with respect to present human culture. I am still talking primarily to myself, though the journal burning parties for thoughts recorded this medium are likely to be less fun than burning paper and smoke disappearing into the night.

Back to the question. What is the proper conception of Christian individual and corporate roles in human institutions and general culture – right now, today, at this cultural moment? Are these roles more oriented to process or product? Should they be viewed as “redemptive” or not? Do Christians merely herald the beauty of the eternal kingdom, which arrives with such cataclysm that the heralds’ trumpets are silenced before their rebirth into the symphony of a consummated kingdom? Or are the heralds’ notes a harmony that blends and builds with the melody of a restored earth and a consummated kingdom? Is there any melody, any cultural riff on God’s revealed truth – on His love – whose audition today will resonate recognizably in eternity? What about the two kingdom approach? Is God’s kingdom, as it unfolds or arrives, demonstrably broader than the Church (as I believe it to be)?

These questions are not merely eschatological, though eschatology is essential to their consideration. I don’t even know if they are the “right” questions – the questions whose answers will scratch my itch. I have some ideas about answers to these questions, but they do not rise above the level of intuition (at best, because it has often proven true in the past) and bias (at worst, simply because it may be invisible).

At its core, this line of inquiry should facilitate an answer to a simple question to ask: “I am a Christian, so how should I live before God and man (and why)?” OK, that’s more than one, but the “line of inquiry” is the why – the bridge we have to cross to get to the how. It’s likely to be a long bridge, and I begin unsure of my method. I suspect that any method is better than no method, so it’s no worry. Here goes: (1) Figure out the right questions to ask, (2) ask the questions of Scripture, and (3) reconcile my answers from Scripture with others’ answers in light of our present cultural position. The third step is likely to induce further items in the second step, so that may be something of a feedback loop.

I will seek the “right questions” by engaging a few different works (some in greater depth than others), perhaps somewhat arbitrary, but they are the ones right here beside me:

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford 2010)

Dick Keyes, Beyond Identity: Finding Your Way in the Image and Character of God (Paternoster 1998)

Though some are harder than others to understand, each of these works is pretty heady and many are abstract. Yet the questions I want to discern and answer are concrete and earthy. In part, these works come to mind because I think that they encircle the questions I want to ask and answer without stating the questions or answering them directly. In part, they make the list because they have been or should be influential in my thinking, but I haven’t yet squeezed all the worth out of them that I can. No doubt I shall need something like Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity to keep my feet on the ground. We’ll see how it goes . . . .

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/of-blogs-and-resurrection-love-in-sin-and-sin-in-love-reprise/feed/0onefearEzraic Nuggethttps://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/ezraic-nugget/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/ezraic-nugget/#respondSun, 10 May 2009 03:27:34 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=79Ezra 7:10 is key verse of book. For Ezra had made his heart firm (established this as an ideal that he owns, which he has directed his life) to pursue in detailed study the Torah of the Lord (particualrly the Pentateuch) and to do it, and to teach statutes and rules in Israel.

In Hebrew you have two lamed-inf construct — in English we would say to study the law of the Lord and to do it. You are expecting asa to be transitive,

Study in order to do, and by being a doer he is then qualified to teach. What is told about EZRA are the things that make him the ideal priestly person.

You have to make it your first pastoral priority to study in order to do and not to study in order to teach. Your first question hast to be how do I own this? The zip, the pow, the bang in ministry comes from authenticity — the transcript of your own soul.

Poor parson in Chaucer’s Prologue. “And was a poor parson of a town, but rich he was of holy thought and work. He was also a learned man, a clerk, that Christ’s Gospel truly would preach, his parishoners devoutly would he teach. . . But Christ’s lore, and his apostles’ twelve, he taught, and first he followed it himself.”

Collins — “Dare we be less?”

This and Malachi 2:1-9 — lips of priest should preserve knowledge. Being someone who has ingested the word and learned how to embody it. Out of the embodiment the mouth speaks.

Is there a reason why Ezra was effective? 7:10 is it. .

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/ezraic-nugget/feed/0onefearDriscoll’s Dance with the NY Timeshttps://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/driscolls-dance-with-the-ny-times/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/driscolls-dance-with-the-ny-times/#respondMon, 12 Jan 2009 21:12:59 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=140Molly Worthen’s piece “Who Would Jesus Smack Down” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine highlights Mark Driscoll and his ministry as pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. No systematic comments, but a few reflections:

Invictus makes its predictable and appropriate appearance in the same stroke of the pen as one of several caricatures of Calvinism: “Yet [Driscoll’s] message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time.”

Worthen’s words accompanying her Invictus reference may give some additional insight into an answer to the second question in that earlier post concerning why the church doesn’t look very different from the world. To really live as if one is not the master of one’s fate and the captain of one’s soul is downright un-American, and the “soul captaincy” embodied in American political and social culture is a force difficult to escape, even in the church.

Many a pastor “planting” a new congregation has learned hard lessons from allowing the vision and mission of the fledgling congregation be diluted by tangential and competing concerns. Yet, in Driscoll and Mars Hill we may see some aspects of how protestant evangelicalism’s broken view of the church (i.e., ecclesiology) makes it harder to escape the cult of personality. I have no way to know the form, content, or spirit of the dissension identified in the last part of the article, but the depiction of opposition from his own leadership as “‘sinning through questioning'” and the alleged practice of shunning recommend church polity and discipline that handle dissension and produce direction from a posture of expectant dependence on God and submission to one another out of reverence for Christ. The nature of the human heart is such that this becomes even more important when what you are doing seems to be successful.

Some have said that earthly, human attention to (and therefore identification of) who is in and who is out, the elect and the non-elect, is an inescapable, if not essential, part of Calvinism. If so, it is to the system’s detriment. In any event, the viewing world seems preoccupied with the doctrines of election and predestination, and seems to treat them as far less mysterious than did Calvin himself.

Finally, and in the category of intuition, irrelevance as a divine vocation still appears to me an essential feature of the pastoral calling. At least in part, this is because relevance and notoriety by nature divide person and persona, leaving observers in the watching world (with access to little more than personality) insufficient relationship with the pastor to accurately read his person, and expanding followers’ opportunities to follow pastoral “personality” rather than the person of Christ modeled through pastoral transparency. Real harm flowing from such circumstances may not reflect the person of the pastor, and certainly would not reflect his desire. Worthen’s closing is chilling, and almost certainly not what Driscoll has in mind: “At one suburban campus that I visited, a huge yellow cross dominated center stage – until the projection screen unfurled and Driscoll’s face blocked the cross from view. Driscoll’s New Calvinism underscores a curious face: the doctrine of total human depravity has always had a funny way of emboldening, rather than humbling its adherents.” Christ is obscured by the opacity of the once-transparent pastor at the peril of the only truly good news for the world.

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/driscolls-dance-with-the-ny-times/feed/0onefearSibling Loyaltyhttps://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/sibling-loyalty/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/sibling-loyalty/#respondSun, 04 Jan 2009 20:00:45 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/sibling-loyalty/M(then 4) to E(then 2 days old): “I’ll always be by your side, but sometimes I’ll be doing other stuff too.” 08.14.02
]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/sibling-loyalty/feed/0onefearYellowhttps://onefear.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/yellow/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/yellow/#commentsMon, 29 Dec 2008 07:13:46 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=129S(7), decked out in all pink, is getting out of the passenger side of the van. Mom is in the front passenger seat. Both are within the hearing of L(3), in purple pants and shirt and yellow coat, who is standing outside to the right of Dad, who just poked his head in the van:

. . .And so we went shopping! We so went shopping, in rumbling herdlike elephant masses, we killed a guy who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. It’s a tragic incident, but by no means meaningless. Shopping is a religion, and some religions demand sacrifices.

The Wal-Mart employee died for us on Black Friday, but have we stopped to think what his sacrifice means? Not at all: We’re stampeding right on through to the other side of Christmas. We aren’t just shopping: We are saving America. . . .

The nihilistic eros of the consumer society, which seems to have drawn much of American Christianity into its wake, creates a desire that can never be satisfied. Ads and shop windows offer us a perpetual stream of icons promising to fulfill our ambitions to have the life that they represent: a fully realized eschatology. Handing our credit card to the salesperson can be a sacrament of this transaction between sign and signified. Yet this anonymous space of endless consumption is the parody of the place of promise: true shalom.

]]>https://onefear.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/wal-mart-religion/feed/0onefearElection Reflectionhttps://onefear.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/election-reflection/
https://onefear.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/election-reflection/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2008 06:55:01 +0000http://onefear.wordpress.com/?p=108Extending Sean Lucas’s good observations about the post-election hyperbole among public commentators and my brief comments there, I wonder about the state of hyperbole everywhere. A couple of reflections:

Shortly after the election, David Brooks remarked on the significance of the fact that the candidates for President were pre-Boomer McCain (b. 1936) v. post-Boomer Obama (b. 1961). Thus, this election may be epochal because it represents the end of sustained political dominance by the Boomers and the rise of the post-Boomers.

Understandably, the hand-wringing is more acute for the Republican Party because many of its segments have no idea what they have to do to bring Xs, Ys, and present-and-future Zs into their ranks en masse. The result of the Presidential election prompted unexpected visceral relief or excitement among many young conservatives, even among those who still voted for McCain. The mixture of relief and excitement varies greatly in its composition, but arises from at least two hopes: (1) that Obama will actually govern in a way that counters many of the moral failures, injustice, and oppression wrought by the Bush administration, and (2) that the failure of the vacuous Republican election message is an opportunity to turn the Republican Party back away from obeisance to Enlightenment Liberalism, statism, and unconstrained vision (using Sowell’s terminology from Conflict of Visions). Of course, history will demonstrate that Bush and Obama each brings his own different moral failures, injustice, and oppression to bear on our society, and history will judge their relative weight.

The secular messianism of many Obama followers will ultimately disappoint. A principled Administration is, however, preferable for everyone over the relatively recent history of Clintonesque thumb-in-the-air pragmatism and Bushesque end-justifies-the-means pragmatism.

An Obama Administration that acts according to principles will be good both for those who agree with those principles and those who disagree with them. If you will allow a little Chesterton:

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men–so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. * * * Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog.

The myopia of many in the church is profound.

Since the election I have heard some in the church cite as the only reason to be thankful for Obama’s victory: (1) anticipated direct religious persecution by the Obama Administration, and (2) judgment by God against the United States for the moral decadence that the victory itself both symbolizes and accomplishes.

I agree that “there is no authority except that which God has established” and positively “The authorities that exist have been established by God.” Rom. 13:1. Surely, then, we cannot dichotomise and reduce God’s posture to any one President merely to “blessing” or “judgment.” Every President is a mixed bag, the actions of each jusifying a mixture of blessing and judgment.

Immediately prior to that verse, Paul gives us our task:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”